The ISTD is an international society whose mission is to raise awareness and interest in all forms of typographic communication. Promoting typographic standards and excellence, their awards are one of the most highly sought after accolades in the industry. Huge congratulations to all our FontFont Designers!

Following our first ever submission to Out Of Box we are proud to announce that FF Ernestine and FF Quixo have both received awards in the Words category.

The bi-annual, international award aims to show the potential of creative professionals across all areas of visual communication, offering them the opportunity to present themselves to a wider audience and an independent jury.

The competition is aimed at young creatives to already established graphic, web and fashion designers, architects, film producers, artists and also large agencies.

Created by type designer Nina Stössinger, FF Ernestine was born from the search for a versatile monolinear text typeface whose design could encompass seemingly opposite feelings. Stössinger wanted to develop a solution that would feel warm, but also serious; slightly feminine, but not too swirly-girly – charming and sturdy at the same time.

FF Quixo is the brainchild of Frank Grießhammer’s graduation project during his time at the Royal Academy of Art, in Den Haag. Exploring pointed-pen calligraphy, he decided to take on the style in a more casual manner, interpreting the model with different-sized brushes.

FF Ernestine has come over all sweet in its latest ‘In-Use’ case as the chosen font for Venco liquorice packaging. Available in several different flavours and styles including sweet, salty, salmiak, soft or tough, these Dutch liquorice treats are perfect for anyone with a sweet tooth!

FF Ernestine was born from the search for a versatile monolinear text typeface whose design could encompass seemingly opposite feelings. Its designer Nina Stössinger wanted to develop a solution that would feel warm, but also serious; slightly feminine, but not too swirly-girly – charming and sturdy at the same time.

Back in February we celebrated the third birthday of our Web FontFonts – how time flies! This month’s round up of our favourite sites featuring Web FontFonts includes the highly popular FF Tisa family by Mitja Miklavčič, Max Phillips’ splendid FF Spinoza and Nina Stössinger’s charmingly sturdy FF Ernestine.

Typografie.info is the largest German-speaking online design platform all about type and typography and is set in Nina Stössinger’s delightfully feminine yet serious, FF Ernestine. Founded in 2001 by Ralf Herrmann, it’s a really active community with news articles and opportunities to share work and opinions.

The design collective AQQ sets their website in Max Phillips’ beautiful and sturdy workhorse, FF Spinoza. They make mainly furniture and are based in California. AQQ stands for “al que quiere” which when roughly translated from latin means “for he who wants it.”

Recognizing the great and the good in the world of typography, the latest annual is the third edition and was judged by three typographic experts: Gail Anderson, Jessica Hische and Jesse Ragan. With over 1900 entries to the competition, we were absolutely thrilled to hear that FF Ernestine, FF Scuba and FF Tisa Sans have each been honored best of the year in typeface design. With an acceptance rate of less than 10%, the Communication Arts Typography Competition is a major competition and inclusion is one of the most-coveted awards in the typographic industry.

FF Ernestine is the first commercial typeface designed by Nina Stössinger. Born out of the search for a versatile monoline text typeface, it is warm with a serious overtone, feminine with an underlying rigid assurance but above all charmingly sturdy. Felix Braden’s first release through FontFont is FF Scuba. The design combines constructed letters, like an almost rectangular o, with dynamic strokes and other written elements, giving the typeface a lively touch, while still keeping it true to its technical roots. Last year, the highly anticipated sans counterpart to Mitja Miklavčič’s popular FF Tisa arrived. FF Tisa Sans has a softer and friendlier feel compared to its serif sister. Whether paired with FF Tisa or used alone, FF Tisa Sans is a perfect choice for branding and editorial projects.

With Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s upcoming Internet Explorer 10, a significant step has been taken toward widespread OpenType feature support, which allows for things like discretionary ligatures in text and contextual alternates in display. Now with standards solidifying, a level of typographic sophistication previously unachievable anywhere will soon be realized. Ushering in the new browser, we share this demo page with live examples of OpenType features at work.(Note that unless viewed in IE10 or a recent version of Firefox or some other new-ish Mozilla browser, the demos won’t make much sense.)

We move ahead now to take a closer look into each of the examples, and discuss what’s required before we can get started taking full advantage of this new ability.

Contextual Swashes | FF Nexus Serif Italic is the most comprehensive font of the FF Nexus Superfamily, containing beautiful sets of swash letters for the beginnings and ends of words. Thanks to the Contextual Swashes feature, the swash variants of the letters appear automatically in the appropriate positions (as opposed to the “regular” Swashes feature, in which you would have to decide yourself which letters should be swashed).

Stylistic Sets | FF Unit holds the library’s record for Stylistic Sets: It has a whopping 14 sets to tailor the look of selected letters to your needs. (39 OT Features in total!)

Contextual Alternates | FF Mister K isn’t available as a Web FontFont yet, and if you switch off the Contextual Alternates feature on the demo site you’ll see why: It just makes no sense to use it without the connections and letter variants that give FF Mister K its special look.

Small Caps | FF Ernestine is one of the few FontFonts containing two sets of small caps: Small and Petite Caps (the only other Petite Cap FontFont being FF Atma Serif). While Small Caps are available as separate Web FontFonts now, Petite Caps only become accessible through browser OpenType feature support.

Discretionary Ligatures | FF Milo Serif is one of the FontFonts that go wild with extravagant ligatures.

Oldstyle Figures and Ligatures | FF DIN Round and FF Tartine Script can actually look like this on your website right now! Unlike the other features shown above, Oldstyle Figures and Ligatures are included (if available in the design) in all WOFF Web FontFonts today. There’s one more feature we didn’t even mention on the demo page: The Kerning feature is activated for the whole demo page. It is most noticeable in combinations like “We” and “y.”, which just look more even with kerning. This feature is included in the current WOFF Web FontFonts and is applied automatically by some browsers.

The stories and faces behind some of our FontFont Designers

Have you got a tremendous typeface design up your sleeve? At FontFont, we are driven by our love for type and typography and are always on the lookout for new typographical talent. When we started back in 1990, our mission was to create ‘fonts for designers by designers’. Since then, designers from across the world have contributed to our library. Twice a year, the TypeBoard, a committee of internal and external experts come together to review submissions.

Our submission policy continues to be as open as ever; we look for original designs and judge all submissions based on their aesthetic, technical and practical merits. If accepted your design will join the ranks of typographical triumphs such as FF Meta, FF Scala, FF DIN, FF Ernestine, and FF Tisa.

From the well-known to the newly discovered, our designers come from all walks of life. Here are the stories and experiences of three different FontFont designers, who have recently released their typefaces through us.

Max Phillips, a New York–based art director, illustrator, toy designer, and novelist (of the award winning ‘Fade to Blonde’), released his first ever typeface as a FontFont. His first beautiful typeface FF Spinoza was developed over a period (on and off) of eleven years. An elegant workhorse, FF Spinoza is a classic text family with individual character to hold its own in display sizes.

‘Basically, I was asked to join a club whose members include Kris Sowersby, Tobias Frere-Jones, Akira Kobayashi, Jean-François Porchez, LeTeRror, Hannes von Döhren, Martin Majoor, Nick Shinn, Jeremy Tankard… the list goes on. And, of course, Neville Brody and Erik Spiekermann. It was the greatest honor of my professional life.’

When describing what it was like to work with FontFont, he said,

‘FontFont took tremendous pains with the work. When Andreas Frohloff returned his first edits on Spinoza, I was a bit dazed. He’d altered almost every glyph in every font. In some cases he'd clearly improved things. In some cases I felt that he was correcting real problems, but that I wanted to correct them in my own way. Andreas was there to help. And that's the way things went. FontFont put a lot of work into Spinoza, but they left the final design decisions to me, even though I was a first-timer and they're the world's foremost independent foundry.’

In contrast to Max, Hannes von Döhren has been designing typefaces for a number of years and set up his own foundry HVD Fonts in 2008. He became well known for his highly successful releases such as Brandon Grotesque, Brevia, Livory, ITC Chino, and Reklame Script.

In 2010, working with Livius Dietzel, he joined forces with FontFont to release FF Basic Gothic.

‘On the one hand type design is all about creativity, optical decisions – the visual, but on the other hand there is a lot of engineering behind a font. Therein, I believe, lies the strength of FontFont. There are many type designers who would prefer to concentrate on the visual. FontFont takes over the visual and technical quality testing of font production and with that guarantees an high level of quality for their fonts.’

Nina Stössinger was also one of our designers who released her first ever commercial typeface design, FF Ernestine, through us. Having studied Multimedia Design and later Type Design, Nina set up her studio in Basel in 2008. Ernestine was born from the search for a versatile monoline text typeface; it's warm with a serious overtone, feminine with an underlying rigid assurance, above all it is charmingly sturdy. She first drew the Roman as a study project at the postgraduate Type Design programme in Zurich, and the Italic in dialogue with Hrant Papazian’s Armenian design.

When asked about what it was like working with FontFont she said:

‘To be honest, I have for a long time dreamed of one day not only designing a typeface, but releasing it through FontFont! Ambitious dreams – and I’m still amazed that they have actually come true. I am both proud and humbled to be part of this great library which in my perception sits right at the crossroads of relevance and innovation, utmost professionalism and agile freshness, trustworthiness and openness to experiment.’

BERLIN, GERMANY, December 2011 – FontShop International announced the latest additions to its award-winning FontFont® typeface library.

New Design

FF Ernestine

FF Ernestine was born from the search for a versatile monoline text typeface that would feel warm yet serious, feminine yet firm, charming yet sturdy. This resulted in a strong slab serif with playful ball terminals. Its rather large x-height and wide, open shapes enable it to work well down to small sizes; ligatures, stylistic and contextual alternates, a selection of arrows, and two sizes of small caps enrich its typographic palette.

Nina Stössinger first drew the Roman as a study project at the postgraduate Type Design programme in Zurich, and the Italic in dialogue with Hrant Papazian’s Armenian design. Both the Roman and the Italic (which doubles as a harmonious companion to the Armenian component) are available in four individually drawn weights. The four corresponding Armenian weights, nicknamed “Vem” —integrated in the Roman and Italic fonts in the Pro version— share the personable character of the family with proportions optimized for the Armenian script.

Updated and Extended FontFonts

After fonts are released, work continues behind the scenes to improve and extend the usefulness of the faces with the addition of new weights and greater language support. FontFont is pleased to announce extensions to the following typefaces, available immediately.

Fred Smeijers has completely overhauled his most popular superfamily. Both FF Quadraat and FF Quadraat Sans get a noticeable update to their designs. FF Quadraat also adds a new weight, Demi Bold, to the family, FF Quadraat Sans and Sans Condensed now come in the additional weights Thin, Extra Light, Light and Demi Bold. They are now available as Pro versions, including support for both the Latin Extended and Cyrillic character sets.

Learn more about the revised FF Quadraat superfamily in this special specimen PDF (2.8 MB).

New Office and Web FontFonts

FF QType

FF QType by Achaz Reuss offers its additional weights, Compressed, Condensed, Extended, and Semi Extended in new formats, Office and Web. Just a refresher: Offc FontFonts are the best choice for all who work with the widely-used Office apps like Word®, Excel® and PowerPoint®. Pro means that it also supports additional languages (Latin Extended).

FF Skill Sets: The Right Fonts for All Purposes

With thousands of FontFonts to choose from, the options can be as daunting as they are exciting. So let the experts do the work for you. Typography masters Erik Spiekermann and Jürgen Siebert handpicked the best FontFonts, and compiled them in three Skill Sets — for advertising, editorial, and corporate design. Simply select which Skill Set best suits your practice, and you can start designing without fuss. Not only will you have all the right fonts licensed in one collection, you’ll save a bundle of cash too.

FontFont Library Tiers

Introducing FontFont Library Tiers: Premium, Collection and Free

In an effort to minimize the amount of time customers spend choosing fonts, we have split our library into three distinct tiers, dubbed the FontFont Library Tier system. Watch out for further information that will come in another post next week.